Clara’s Verdict
The Prisoner of Heaven is the third novel in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books sequence, and it is a book that rewards a reader’s memory and patience in equal measure. Zafón returns to a Barcelona rendered in gothic shadow, and here he draws together the worlds of The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game with real cunning, so that a story you thought you knew suddenly deepens.
What I love about Zafón is the way he makes literature itself a matter of life and death, and this novel of love, passion and revenge wears its bookishness proudly. At just over seven hours it is the most compact of the sequence, and while newcomers can follow it, I suspect its full effect depends on having walked these Barcelona streets before.
It is romantic, melodramatic in the finest sense, and quietly devastating about the long reach of the past.
Zafón’s Barcelona is one of the great settings in modern fiction, a city of bookshops, secrets and shadow, and this novel deepens it by folding the pasts of his earlier heroes into one another. The pleasure here is architectural as much as narrative; you can feel the whole edifice of the sequence clicking quietly into place around you as old mysteries acquire new meaning. For a returning reader, that sensation of a design revealing itself is genuinely thrilling.
About the Audiobook
The third book in The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, The Prisoner of Heaven opens in Barcelona at Christmas in 1957. Daniel Sempere and his wife Bea have much to celebrate, with a beautiful new baby son and their close friend Fermín Romero de Torres about to be wed. Their joy is eclipsed when a mysterious figure with a porcelain hand enters the Sempere bookshop, threatening to reveal a terrible secret buried for two decades.
His appearance plunges Fermín and Daniel into a dangerous adventure that reaches back to the 1940s, the early days of Franco’s dictatorship and the very heart of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. It is a rich, labyrinthine tale of love, literature, passion and revenge, set in a dark, gothic Barcelona in which the heroes of The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game must contend with a nemesis that threatens to destroy them.
The Narration
Peter Kenny narrates, and over seven hours and change he proves an inspired match for Zafón’s romantic, shadow-soaked prose. He gives Fermín in particular a roguish theatricality that longtime readers of the sequence will recognise and relish, and he shades the darker passages of imprisonment and betrayal with a fittingly sombre colour.
Kenny understands that this is a story told as much for its atmosphere as its plot, and he lets the descriptions of postwar Barcelona breathe. His pacing honours the novel’s shifts between wit and menace, so the listening experience captures both the charm and the gathering dread that define Zafón at his best.
Kenny’s Fermín is the performance to savour, all wit and wounded bravado, but he is just as assured in the bleaker, prison-set passages that form the novel’s dark heart. His reading holds the book’s two moods, the playful and the tragic, in a balance that feels entirely true to Zafón’s voice. He understands that the comedy and the cruelty are not opposites here but two faces of the same story, and he honours both.
What Readers Say
On Amazon the audiobook holds an average of 4.5 stars, though from a small base of just 6 ratings, so these are early impressions rather than a settled verdict. Among the written reviews, Lou C awarded five stars and found it thoroughly entertaining, with characters so strong and believable that she wanted to reread the earlier novels at once. CazzaS, also five stars, felt Zafón was back to his best, and that this book cleverly marries the first two together.
A reader named liz went further, calling it his best yet and praising how easily the storyline follows while remaining intriguing, right down to poring over old maps of Barcelona. A four-star reviewer agreed it is an excellent addition to the series while advising, sensibly, that it is best read after the first two. The enthusiasm here is warm, if drawn from a modest number of voices.
The reviews return, again and again, to the question of reading order, with most agreeing that the book is richest when taken after The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game. Several readers admitted the novel sent them straight back to reread the earlier titles, which is perhaps the surest sign of how satisfyingly it ties the sequence together. From a small pool of ratings the enthusiasm is strong, if necessarily provisional.
Who Should Listen?
The Prisoner of Heaven is for readers who love literary, atmospheric fiction and, above all, for those already enchanted by Zafón’s Barcelona. Newcomers may follow the plot, but the emotional resonance belongs to those who have read the earlier novels. If a gothic tale of books, secrets and revenge draws you in, you can Listen to The Prisoner of Heaven on Audible and return to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
